Knowing how much traffic your website is getting is quite important in determining how good a job you’re doing overall. It tells you how relevant your content is, whether people like it or not and how well you’re doing optimization-wise. If everything is going well, your site will be popular, people will enjoy your content and this will definitely show in various analytic. However, if this is not the case, don’t despair. Even though it may point out that you’re not doing a good job, the traffic you’re getting may be a result of many things. If your site is new, then of course you’re not going to be the most popular thing on the Internet since Google. However, you can track the traffic and look for trends – you can see when people visit your site the most and what they’re looking at; you can adjust your style based on what your readers like; and you can engage in some better SEO practices. If you were doing black hat, that will probably show in the decrease in the traffic you’re getting because of the decline in your rank. You can easily fix that, but you have to know about it first. Here’s how you can find out.
Alexa Ranking
Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon. The Alexa Ranking shows the approximate popularity of a website on the Web. You can look for worldwide rankings, as well as regional. The problem with Alexa is that the ranking includes only people who have installed the Alexa toolbar. This means that if 1000 people visit a site, but only 1 of them has the toolbar, only 1 will be detected. There is another alternative – having the Alexa widget on your website, which enables people to click on it and still register without them having the toolbar. However, this means that the rankings are rather limited, which causes many experts to question Alexa’s accuracy and relevance. Still, when you take a look at the top sites, you see names like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – all of them are rather popular so there has to be some accuracy to Alexa, after all. Don’t count too much on these results, but you can still install the toolbar and widget and see what your rank is. If you’re doing well on Alexa, then you’re doing well overall. And if you’re doing badly, well, don’t be discouraged – it’s not the end of the world.
Google Trends for Websites
Well, this tool has Google’s name on it, so you know it will be good and accurate. Google Trends doesn’t give you direct numbers, but instead gives you a side-by-side graph comparison of how different websites are doing. Even though it doesn’t get you any numerical values, it grants you the ability to see how well you’re doing as compared to your competition. Also, on the count of the fact that only websites with a relatively high traffic get registered there, if you can actually find yourself, this means you’re doing relatively well. The tool is rather accurate so you can be certain that the results you see reflect reality, and unlike Alexa is not bound only to users who have the toolbar. It’s overall a very useful tool to have at your disposal. It includes data from Google Analytics, searches, and other Google-provided services so you know its estimations are good. If you can’t find your site, though, that means your site doesn’t get too much traffic, so you will either need to work on it longer, or you will have to do a better job. Aside from those two, you don’t really need anything else to estimate your site’s traffic.
